Best programming and hacker quotes. Ever.
Curated by fellow hackers Jarmo Pertman & Andri Möll
Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible.
Larry Wall
When I have a specific goal in mind and a complicated piece of code to write, I spend my time making it happen rather than telling myself stories about it.
Steve Yegge
Though the Chinese should adore APL, it's FORTRAN they put their money on.
Alan J. Perlis
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage
The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.
Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy
Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else.
Eagleson's Law
If we believe in data structures, we must believe in independent (hence simultaneous) processing. For why else would we collect items within a structure? Why do we tolerate languages that give us the one without the other?
Alan J. Perlis
I've never written the best code I've ever written.
Anonymous
Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones.
Alan J. Perlis
Use four digits. A new millenium is coming.
Jon Bentley (1976)